Artemisia

Starring: Valentina Cervi, Michel Serrault

Release: 1997

Artemisia (1997) follows the early career of Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, often credited as the first genuinely successful Western female painter. At a time when women were reliant on their male relatives for everything, Gentileschi supported herself, her husband, and their children with her often large original oil paintings. The film ends before any of this occurred, when Gentileschi was a teenager under the tutelage of her father Orazio and the painter Agostino Tassi. In particular, the film focuses on her physical relationship with Tassi, a relationship that would lead to jail time for him.

The film represents their relationship as passionate and intellectual. Their physical and artistic relationships are intertwined – they are shown lying in bed together animatedly debating sketches for her oil painted pictures. When Orazio discovers the affair, the film says, he put Tassi on trial for rape, despite Artemisia’s protestations. In reality, while the facts surrounding the relationship and trial are controversial, this doesn’t seem to have been a grand sweeping love affair.

Our 17th century predecessors unfortunately did not share our modern understanding of consent, and so reading the trial transcripts can be confusing. At least Gentileschi and Tassi’s first encounter was likely forced, to which Artemisia testified in court and then retestified to under torture (a way to “verify” that the accuser was being honest). On this point, the film is completely fictionalized: the film shows Artemisia being tortured because she remains contrary to her father’s account and won’t testify that she was attacked. The film also omits several key elements of Tassi’s character: he had an affair with (and likely also assaulted) his sister-in-law and plotted to murder his wife. The film takes a convicted rapist and attempted murderer and presents him as a passionate, supportive lover and mentor. At worst this is morally offensive and at best this is art history that dramatically skews all understanding of Gentileschi’s work.

So why would I recommend this movie? Other films on this list skew the truth (Andrei Rublev, Goya's Ghosts, and Girl with a Pearl Earring all largely fictionalize their oil portrait artists), but none give the offense that Artemisia does. But, for the purposes of studying films about artists, its merits outweigh its offenses. Today, it can be difficult to imagine the exact hurdles that female artists in the past faced, but this movie helps to clarify them. The film shows Gentileschi largely as a self portrait painter, and with good reason – as a woman, she had access to no other models, and certainly no access to the male nudes that her male counterparts had. As she points out, this prevented her from truly understanding male musculature, putting her at a marked disadvantage in creating the realistic style of oil portrait painting she craved. Her contemporaries ridiculed her attempts, and Tassi was only brought in to tutor her because no school would accept a woman (she would eventually become the first accepted into the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno), even after seeing her impressive sketches and a canvas portrait of herself.

While our understanding of sexual relationships might not be identical to that of Gentileschi’s contemporaries, her original oil art paintings and portraits suggest that she felt the same fury we do when reading about how she was treated as an artist because of her gender. Many of her oil painted pictures focus on the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, in which the widow Judith and her handmaiden decapitate an invading general after using Judith’s feminine appeals to lull him into a drunken sleep. Gentileschi seemed to find release through painting a picture of this story of female camaraderie in opposition to a cruel male force. Gentileschi was a self portrait painter; some of those works were just thematic self portrait oil paintings. Gentileschi broke a boundary that literally no woman before her had crossed, and her frustration shows in her work. The film, despite its grievous offenses in its representation of Gentileschi’s relationship with Tassi, presents this aspect of her life well, and that makes it worth a viewing.

Don't miss the other blog posts in my series on movies about artists!

10 Movies You Should See About Artists:

• #10 - Andrei Rublev
• #9 - Lust for Life
• #8 - Goya's Ghosts
• #7 - Pollock
• #6 - Basquiat
• #5 - Girl with a Pearl Earring
• #4 - The Agony and the Ecstasy
• #3 - Frida